Eyes closed, see your inner being in detail. Thus see your true nature.
- Total closure is more than dropping the lids: with eyes merely shut, remembered images of outside things keep flooding in and the eyes go on moving to ‘see’ them. ‘Total’ means blank inner darkness, nothing left to see, as if suddenly blind even to dream-images. Needs long practice; it cannot be done at one stroke.
- The eyes are the body’s least-bodily point, nearest the source, so a single jump from them reaches within (from a hand or the heart the distance is great); and eye-movement is welded to thought (moving eyes = active mind, still eyes = still mind), so freezing the eyes is the lever. Four steps — Osho maps them onto Buddha’s deliberate entry into nirvana (he withdrew to his source before death reached the body): (1) close the eyes; (2) stop all eye-movement until they sit like stones, zero flicker; (3) view the body from within, standing at the inner center and touring every limb from toe to head; (4) enter the mind, the nine hidden layers beneath its one surface layer. The looker is never the looked-at: whatever can be observed (body, mind) is not you.
- The endpoint is the witness that cannot be witnessed. The self is irreducibly the knower, never the known, so ‘witnessing the witness’ is a contradiction; whatever can be seen or penetrated is not you. Logically this means no self can ever be found, but existentially, once every object has been seen through, pure subjectivity remains with nothing around it: that objectless seer is the true nature — eternal, beyond name and form, alpha and omega. Language, built for duality, cannot capture it.
- Only the first glimpse is hard. Once the eyes have turned in even once, you have the knack — going in and coming out becomes as easy as stepping out of a house and back in. All the difficulty lies before that first turning.
- Q3 — close the eyes relaxedly, never by force. Forced closing tenses the face and eyes, tires them, and breeds the very uneasiness practitioners report. Let the lids simply drop. To feel the difference: first deliberately clench the whole face and eyes hard, hold, then release into softness. Then fill the field with deep velvety darkness — feel yourself in a dark night, even dying; with nothing to see, the eyes stop of themselves.
- Q3 — as the eyes still, energy rises and hammers the third eye (warmth, then a liquid fire seeking a new path): this is normal — cooperate, do not flee. It eventually reveals a sourceless light. Critical pitfall: do not imagine it. Those who imagine spiritual visions remain exactly the same person — angry, mediocre, childish; only a real opening transforms you so visibly that others feel it without being told. Wait; never manufacture the experience. (If the fire ever feels like a live bullet about to pierce the skull, stop at once, open the eyes and move them vigorously, and do not continue unguided.)